The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  Later, standing in a group with M’Gruder, I looked over and saw Dana alone with Ulka, talking quietly to her. Ulka nodded. She was watching Vance. I could not get anywhere with Vance. I tried to play do-you-know with him, bringing up the names of some of the Florida sailboat bums I know. Yes, he knew them. Sure. So what. I guessed he could not become interested in trivia. He had taken two horrible risks to acquire and keep the Viking princess. Maybe somebody was getting set to drop the noose on him and end it. Apprehension could make small talk almost impossible. I could not comprehend M’Gruder’s promise to put this creature back into college. I found it hard to believe that a professorial type had spawned her. In days of old whenever one of these rarities appeared, one of the king’s agents would run to the castle with the news, and the girl-child would disappear forever into one of the royal suites, and her family would get a little sack of gold coins in exchange. In these more random times they are grabbed off by oil men, celebrity athletes, television moguls and M’Gruders. But the man who has one stays nervous because, unless you are a king, you don’t really get to own it. It is on temporary loan from providence.

  Later I sat near Ulka in a big game room in the house while she carved and chewed her way through a huge rare steak, knife and teeth flashing, jaw muscles and throat working, her eyes made blank by a total concentration on this physical gratification. The effort made a sweaty highlight on her pale brow, and at last she picked up the sirloin bone and gnawed it bare, putting a slick of grease on lips and fingertips. There was no vulgarity in this hunger, any more than when a tiger cracks the hip socket to suck the marrow.

  The party fragmented, and there was room enough for them to roam all the house and grounds, various degrees of alcohol dividing them more positively than social class or business interest. I had lost track of Dana, and I went night-walking in unhurried search. Skirting a tall cactus garden, floodlighted in eerie blue, I heard, off to my right, a conspiratorial rasp of female venom. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” It was more contemptuous than indignant. I sought to move quietly out of range. I did not care how husbands were gutted in this desert paradise. I imagined it was done the same as elsewhere.

  But the male voice stopped me. “All I want to know is where you …” The rest of the sentence was lost. He had raised his voice to cut her off and lowered it as she fell silent. But it was Vance M’Gruder.

  “You are so smart! You are soooooo smart! Oh, God, what a brilliant mind I married!”

  “Sssh, Ullie. Don’t shout!”

  “Maybe it was one of my Mexican boyfriends. How about that? Hah? How about that? And just what would you do about it?” Sweet voice of Ulka Atlund M’Gruder, bride of two months. And where was the sleepy remote smile? The placid acceptance? This was the malignancy of a taunting woman, an emasculating woman. He shushed her again and they moved off, out of range. I circled and discovered I had been near the path that probably led over to the guest house.

  I admit feeling a certain dirty little satisfaction. It was as if the fox had made one leap just high enough and found out the grapes actually were sour. Here was this brown hard bundle of sport muscles trying to kid the calendar by wedding the glorious child bride, and now all his game-skills and all his money and his social standing were no defense at all against that killer-instinct which could launch her right at his most vulnerable point, his aging masculinity. Seeking paradise, he had embraced a sweet disaster.

  The party dwindled. Laughter was drunken. A group sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

  I stood with Dana, saying goodnight, and Joanne Barnweather swayed against us, and said, “You all come riding tomorrow morning, you hear? Got lovely horses. Jus’ lovely. Diana, sweetie, like I said, I got stuff’ll fit you. Don’ worry ’bout it. Jus’ you all and us and the M’Gruders. You know what, Diana? Ulka liked you. She wants you ‘long. How about that anyhow? To find out she likes anybody. Crissake, we’ve known Vance forever and we love the sweet ol’ son of a bitch, and it was great he got loose from that limey dyke, believe me, but hones’ I can’t figure this Ulka. Sheese! A zombie, thass what she is. I shouldn’t talk like this, but I’m a wee little bit stoned, sweeties. What you do, you get here like nine in the morning, okay?”

  On the way home Dana said, “Horses scare me.”

  “How did you make out?”

  “Didn’t you hear? She likes me. But I never would have been able to tell. Trav, that child has very limited reactions, really. I had a friend who got like that once. They said finally it was a hypothyroid condition. She sort of drifted, slept fourteen hours a night and couldn’t keep track of conversations. Believe me, dear, I tried. I really tried. I had about forty minutes alone with her. I tried to drop key words into it to get some kind of a reaction. After a long struggle I did find out that her husband played poker last Wednesday night. He loves a good poker session, she said. She said he didn’t come back until Thursday just before noon. I practically had to shake her to get that much out of her.”

  I did not tell Dana I felt uneasy. I had the feeling the play was being taken away from us. I had made a move. Now either this was all innocence, or M’Gruder was making one. I resolved to handle myself as though he were making a move. Violence is the stepchild of desperation.

  We both had to borrow gear. Glenn Barnweather’s pants were too short in the leg and big in the waist for me. Dana had a slightly different problem with Joanne’s twill britches. The waist was fine and the length was good, but in thigh and bottom Dana filled them to bursting. The stable hands saddled the mounts while a rather shaky Joanne doled out therapeutic rum sours. Joanne assigned the mounts. Dana, as a novice, got a rather plump and amiable mare. I was given a hammerhead buckskin with a rolling eye. He sensed a certain incompetence and tried to simultaneously nibble my leg and bash me into a post. I sawed him and kicked him into a dubious docility. By all odds, as we went clattering and snorting up a long baked slope, Joanne and Vance were the best of the group. Elbows in, heels correct, moving like a part of the animal. Glenn on a big red stallion was a close second. Ulka and I were about on a level. She looked glorious in pale blue denim with a white cowgirl hat on the back of her fair head, laced under her chin. Ulka seemed much merrier than on the night before. But Vance looked wretched. He had a greenish look under his tan. His eyes were bloodshot. With the air of a man under great tension he had knocked down three sours in rapid order before mounting.

  Joanne chattered about the ranch and what they were eventually going to do with it. She pointed out where things would be. My damned horse kept trying to stumble to see if he could loosen me a little bit, then hurl me the rest of the way. For a time I rode beside Ulka. She dipped into a pale leather pouchpurse she wore looped around one wrist and got out cigarettes, leaned and gave me one, then leaned and after several near-misses, managed to give me a light. We smiled in wordless idiocy at each other. Her big breasts bounced very firmly under the denim. Her classic nose was shiny. I lost her when my horse moved up from a canter into a full run. He didn’t seem to like a canter. He tended to drop back into a spine-shattering trot, or suddenly go like hell. He kept me busy. Suddenly everybody, at Glenn’s suggestion, went careening across rocky flats toward a distant stand of trees. My horse was beginning to take me a little more seriously. We were spread out. Dana was up with Glenn, hunched toward the horse’s neck, perhaps grasping at the saddle horn, pale pants bouncing. Joanne was at my left and a half a length ahead of me.

  That was when Ulka Atlund M’Gruder gave her terrible, piercing scream. The horses had violent reactions. I went up with mine and came down with mine, then spurred him forward and caught at Dana just as she began to slip off the side of her mare’s neck, hauled her back toward the saddle. Glenn had taken off to the left. I looked and saw M’Gruder’s horse running wildly in that direction, with a terrible rag-doll figure bounding along the rocks beside the rear hooves. It slipped free and lay still, wet-shiny with some patches of red. Ulka dismounted and, screaming again, ran stumbling acros
s the rocks to drop beside the figure. I dropped off and knotted my barbarous steed to a dwarfed bush. Dana’s mare suddenly took off, heading for home. Joanne reined around and set out after Dana. I ran over to the body. It took one look to identify it forever as such. I pulled Ulka to her feet and walked her away from it. She was shuddering, over and over.

  “He just leaned forward and slipped off,” she said in her thin little voice with just a trace of accent. “He slipped off but his foot was caught. He just leaned forward and slipped off. Oh my God.” She dropped onto her knees and haunches, face in her hands.

  They brought the body back in a jeep and transferred it into an ambulance near the Barnweather house. The necessary red tape was handled with dispatch. We all agreed that M’Gruder had not seemed well. Ulka said that he’d had a stomach upset and had not slept. She rested in Joanne’s bedroom. Joanne and Dana were with her. Her father was notified. He would arrive in Phoenix Sunday morning to take her back to San Francisco. The funeral would be there. M’Gruder’s lawyer was notified. Reporters hovered around, sitting in cars, looking irritable.

  I sat in the terrace shade with Glenn Barnweather. He kept shaking his head and saying, “Hell of a thing, hell of a thing,” and then fixing himself another stiff bourbon.

  “He certainly had everything to live for,” I said.

  “Christ, you ought to see his place in Hawaii. Her place now, I guess. You know why it hits her so damned hard having it happen right now? I got woozy last night. If I’d gone to bed, I’d have been sick. I took a little walk. Sounds carry in the night. They were having one hell of a battle last night. Screaming at each other. I couldn’t hear the words. It went on a long time. You wouldn’t think she could get that worked up, would you? Maybe it was their first fight. I had the idea he was in charge. Maybe he thought so too. A man married two months and he can stay out all night for poker when there’s that item home in bed, you know he has to be boss.”

  “Poker?”

  “Down in town at the club last Wednesday. It’s a regular thing. All-night session once a month. He dropped about two thousand. I got some of it. I would have had more, but he came back pretty good toward the end.”

  When you sell yourself something, and all the parts fit, you resent the hell out of having somebody kick the foundation out from under it. You want to grab the structure to keep it from falling down.

  “He played all night long?” I said, looking at that big red earnest face, looking in vain for any hint of lie or evasion.

  His fleeting grin was mildly lewd. “Well into the bright cruel light of day, McGee. I can understand anybody being startled, after a good look at that Swede bride. Maybe poor Vance had to take a breather. She looks like one hell of a project.”

  My pretty tower fell down. Fallacious suppositions make a hell of a jangle when they hit the dirt, particularly when you dislike the person you’ve nominated. I’d heard one little piece of that quarrel too, a piece that could be related to the previous Wednesday night. Maybe I’d heard him asking her where she’d gone that night. And she taunted him about Mexican boyfriends …

  “Did Ulka have a night on the town too?” I asked him. “She was going to, but not what you’d call a real swinging situation. One of Joanne’s concert things. I miss every one I can. Cocktails and a dinner party and a concert party. It was all set up, and Ulka decided not to go, and Joanne went alone.”

  “Maybe Ulka went out later. Did they have a rental car?”

  “I loaned them the Corvette I bought Jo. It’s the three-sixty, and it’s just too much car for her. It scares her. Vance was wondering about buying it and they could drive it to San Francisco and have the rest of their stuff shipped. Okay with me, but we didn’t get around to making the deal. It’s new. About fifteen hundred miles on it. It scares Jo. She gets absent-minded and gooses it and it scares her.”

  “Was that Wednesday night the only time they’ve been apart?”

  “He stuck pretty close to her.”

  “They drive around in that car much?”

  “We were keeping them too busy. What’s this all about?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. Idle chatter.” After some small talk, he fixed himself another drink and ambled off into the house. I went down the path to the guest house. The Sting Ray was in the carport, top down. I looked at the speedometer, and then walked slowly and thoughtfully back to the main house. I couldn’t tell Glenn what was on my mind. The toppled pieces of my theory suddenly looked good again. I was putting it back together, with a new name on it. The problem was motive. A weird guess stopped me in my tracks. I took long strides the rest of the way to the main house.

  I whispered to Dana in the hallway. “Honey, just keep anybody from going into that bedroom. Make any excuse you can think of.”

  “You look so strange, darling.”

  “I feel strange.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “When I’m sure. Then I can tell you.”

  I went into Joanne’s bedroom and closed the door behind me. It was a long room. The draperies were drawn. It was early afternoon. Ulka reclined on a quilted yellow chaise with a fuzzy yellow blanket over her lap. Her slanted eyes were reddened. She was still in her stretch denim, and drifting on the airconditioned chill was the faint effluvium of saddle horse. She watched me with apparent unconcern as, without greeting, I pulled a hassock over close to the chaise and sat facing her. She had so much presence I had to remind myself she was, after all, just an eighteen-year-old girl, with the very last diminishing hint of a childish roundness in her cheeks.

  Silence is a useful gambit, but I could not tell if it was having any effect at all upon her.

  “Well, Ullie,” I said.

  “I will never let anyone else ever call me that, all my life.”

  “That’s very sentimental, Ullie. Very tender-hearted. I guess you are a very tender-hearted girl. You didn’t want your father upset, did you? Those pictures Ives took of your husband-to-be would have upset the professor. He would have forbidden the marriage. And you are a dutiful daughter. Ives was a very greedy fellow. He knew how badly Vance wanted you. He must have asked for a great deal of money. You know, it wasn’t smart of Ives to blackmail his previous client with the pictures he took, because Vance knew him. Ives must have decided Vance was incapable of violence.”

  She frowned and shook her pretty head. “Ives? Pictures? Blackmail? Why do you come in here with this crazy talk?”

  “Ives had to get it in one big chunk because as soon as you were married to Vance, there was no more leverage Ives could use. I guess Vance must have confessed the problem to you and showed you the pictures, perhaps to see if you would marry without Daddy’s permission, so he could save a bundle. It’s pretty sad and funny, Ullie. Your great respect for your father, and no respect for life.”

  “You should not call me Ullie. I will not permit it.”

  “Vance must have thought it was just a marvelous accident when Ives got killed. All he cared was that it got him off the hook, and when no confederate appeared to pick up where Ives had left off, he knew he was home free. He was going to have the girl, the gold ring and everything. His tragedy was in slowly finding out what a psychotic bitch you really are.”

  “Who are you? You must be mad, entirely.”

  “Let’s check it out together, Ullie. No one suspected Vance. Patty, his ex-wife, was the only one in the world in a position to brood about it and begin to add two and two. And finally she got an answer and checked it out as closely as she could, and knew she had Vance right where she wanted him. She had every reason to want to get back at him. Believing Vance had killed Ives, and knowing that he could be a good big source of income to her for the rest of her life, she got in touch with him. I think we can figure out how that went wrong, Ullie. Vance could prove where he was on the night of December fifth. But where was his darling girl? Quite a husky girl. And someone who could get close to Ives and close to Patty at night, in lonely places, whereas Vance couldn’t
have managed it. After you’d bashed Ives, Patty was a necessity. Clumsy murder is like housework, dear. Once you begin, you’re never really finished.”

  “All this is so absurd, and so boring.”

  “Patty would have persisted, and sooner or later Vance would have had to face the idea that you killed Ives. Maybe he couldn’t stomach that. Maybe he would have turned you in. He was finding out that his marriage wasn’t what he had counted on.”

  “We couldn’t have been happier!”

  “Ullie! Ullie! What about the Mexican boyfriends? Just little flirtations, I imagine. Just enough to keep him off balance, make him sweat.”

  “How could you.…” She stopped. I could guess she remembered how he had tried to shush her. Her breathing had gone slightly shallow and there were spots of color in flawless cheeks. I saw her recover herself with an effort, slowing and deepening her breathing.

  “I don’t imagine Vance really wanted to play poker. You left unobserved, you got back unobserved. Home free. But all it would take would be legwork, Ullie. One of those plodding methodical checks of every gas station along the way. You didn’t have the range. Some little joker is probably still dreaming about you—the most beautiful girl he ever saw, coming in out of the night in that Sting Ray.”

  “So? I got very restless. I took a drive. I drive very fast. Can I help it if Vance got very suspicious of me, if he got very foolish ideas? You don’t know how it is … how it was. He wanted to be … so very young and lively and fun, to be like boys I know. But really he wanted things quieter. I could see strangers laughing at him. He should have had dignity! Certainly I wanted all that money and travel and clothes and fun. A professor has a shabby little life. All my life I knew the husband I would have, older and very rich and strong, to buy me everything and adore me, to sit and smile at me and admire me when I danced with all the young men, and trust me. When I’d found him I could not lose him. But every day was a contest to see … which one of us was younger. He did not understand how love should be a perfection. All he cared was how many times he could take me. He thought that was another way to be young. Why did he have to prove so much? I can tell about you. You would understand. You are older too, but not as old as he was. You are stronger, Travis McGee. There is the money now. I listened when you told Joanne about your funny little boat with the funny name.” She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them wide and looked at me. “You see, I have always … felt like a special person. As if my life would be … beautiful and important. Things happen in strange ways. Vance was not the one. But suddenly you are here. It is strange. It is so strange the way we both have that little feeling it would be … what was planned for us all along.”